Mark Lichfield News Today

SIR – The cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason describes feeling uncomfortable about the playing of Rule, Britannia! at the Last Night of the Proms (report, January 21). Perhaps if there was wider awareness of the origins of these words, minds might be set to rest. Rule, Britannia! was inspired by a lad from Penryn, Cornwall. Thomas Pellow was 11 years old and on his first sea voyage with his uncle when they were captured by Barbary pirates and taken into horrific, cruel, brutal slavery under Sulta...

SIR – Simon Coveney, Ireland’s foreign minister, says the Northern Ireland Protocol was “freely chosen and jointly designed by the British Government and the EU” (Comment, May 15).

SIR – Particularly where it tells citizens what they must and must not do in their daily lives, the law must be clear.

SIR – I currently have a very sick relative in hospital suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and an aggressive cancer.